Restarting on logon screen

[gizmosmustang]

Ok a friend of mine just bought a used dell for her daughter everything worked fine on it for about 1 week and all of a sudden it started restarting itself on the logon screen the operating system is windows xp home. can anyone tell me what can be done about it and if a windows repair would work with an xp disc?
Matt

[Capper]

First, I'd recommend removing the side panel and taking a can of compressed air to it.....making sure to clean the HSF (heat sink fan) and the motherboard really well (Also dust off the case fans). A lot of people using pre-fabbed systems never remove the side panel, and they should as they are poorly wired, which leads to heat issues.

After that, fire it up with the side panel off, to see if the HSF is spinning....sometimes the fan dies, or isn't connected, and the processor overheats, causing the system to shut down.

Having failed that, we can try booting into safe mode and see if that keeps the system running, or if it continues to shut down. If it keeps shutting down at boot, a fresh install of Windows may be the only option.

Other than all of that, I'd look at the PSU (They use crap PSUs for their systems).

[gizmosmustang]

ok i cleaned everything with air and tried the virus program but it won't even give me time to install it but everything works in safe mode is there anyway to find the file through safe mode or do I just need to have them order a copy of windows xp professional from newegg?

[Capper]

While in Safe Mode, are you able to restore the system to an earlier restore point (I know you said you hadn't created one, but there might be an older one)?

You also might try uninstalling any recently installed programs while in Safe Mode. The REPAIR feature might work, if you have an XP disk.